Tristessa (9 page)

“Well, you cant do that—you havent got the money.”

But Tristessa keeps looking at me and I keep staring at her, suddenly we love each other as Bull drones on and I admire her openly and she shines openly—Earlier, I'd grabbed her, when she said “You remember everything the other night?”—“Yes”—“in the street, how you kiss me”—And I show her how she'd kissed me.

That little gentle brush of the lips on the lips, with just the slightest kiss, to indicate kiss—She'd shined on that one—She didnt care—

She had no money to take the cab home, no bus was running, we had no more money any of us (except money in the bloodbank) (money in the mudbank, Charley)—“Yes, I walk home.”

“Three miles, two miles,” I say, and there was that long walk through the rain I remembered—“You can come up there,” pointing to my room on the roof, “I wont bother you, no te molesta.”

“No te molesta” but I would leave her molest me—Old Bull is glancing over his glasses and paper, I've screwed everything up with the mama again, Oedipus Rex, I'll tear out my eyes in the morning—San Francisco, New York, Padici, Medu, Mantua or anywhere, I'm always the King sucker who was made out to be the positional son in woman and man relationships, Ahhyaaaaa—(Indian howl in the night, to campo-country sweet musica)—“King, bing, I'm always in the way for momma and poppa—When am I gonna be poppa?”

“NO TE MOLESTA,” and too, for Bull, my poppa,—I said: “I'd have to be a junkey to live with Tristessa, and I cant be a junkey.”

“Aint nobody knows junkies like another junkey.”

I gulp to hear the truth, too—

“Besides, too, Tristessa is an oldtime junkey, like me, she no chicken—in junk—Junkies are very strange persons.”

Then he would launch into a long story about the strange persons he's known, in Riker's Island, in Lexington, in New York, in Panama—in Mexico City, in Annapolis—In keeping with his strange history, which included opium dreams of strange tiered racks where girls are being fed opium through dreamy blue tubes, and similar strange episodes like all the innocent
faux pas
he'd made, tho always with an evil greed just before it, he'd thrown up at Annapolis after a binge, in the showers, and to conceal it from his officers he'd tried to wash it down with the hot water, with the result the smell permeated “all of Bradley Hall” and there was a beautiful poem written about it in the newspaper of the Navy Goats—He would launch into long stories but she was there and with her he just conducted routine junkey talk in baby Spanish, like, “You no go tomorrow good look like that.”

“Yes, I clean my face now.”

“It no look good—They take one look at you and they know you takin too many secanols”

“Yes, I go”

“I brush your coat—” Bull gets up and helps clean her things—

To me he says, “Them artists and writers, they dont like to work—Dont believe in work” (as the year before, as Tristessa and Cruz and I chatted gayly with the gaiety I had last year, in the room, he's banging with a Mayan stone statue about the size of a big fist trying to fix the door he'd broken down the night before because he took too many goofballs and went out of his room and locked-clicked the padlock, key in the room and him in his pajamas at One A M)—wow, I do gossippy—(So he'd yelled at me “Come help me fix this door, I cant do this by myself”—“Oh yes you can, I'm talking”—“You artists are all lazy bums”)

Now to prove I'm not like that I get up slowly, dizzy from that shot of their love stuff, and get some water in the tin pitcher to heat on the upturned ray-lamp so's Tristessa can have hot water for her wound-wash—but I hand him the pitcher because I cant go thru the hassel of balancing it on the flimsy wires and anyway he's the old master Old Wizard Old Water Witch Doctor who can do it and wont let me try it—Then I get back on the bed, prostrate—prostate gland too, as morphine takes all the sex out of your parts and leaves it somewhere else, in your gut—Some people are all guts and no heart—I take heart—You shoot spades—You drink clubs—You blast oranges—I take heart and bat—Two—Three—Ten trillion million dizzying powder of stars fermangitatin in the high blue Jack Shaft—prop—I dont drown no buddies in oil—I got no guts to do it—Got heart not to—But the sex, when the morphine is loosed in your flesh, and slowly spreads, hot, and headies your brain, the sex recedes into the gut, most junkies are thin, Bull and Tristessa are both bags of bones—

But O the grace of some bones, that milt a little flesh hang-on, like Tristessa, and makes a woman—And Old Bull, spite of his thin hawky body nobody, his gray hair is well slicked and his cheek is youthful and sometimes he looks positively pretty, and in fact Tristessa had finally one night decided to make it and he was there and they made it, good—I wanted some of that too, seein's how Bull didnt rise to the issue except once every twenty years or so—

But no, that's enough, hear no more, Min n Molly n Bill n Gregory Pegory Fibber McGoy, oy, I'd leave them be and go my own way—“Find me a Mimi in Paris, a Nicole, a sweet Tathagata Pure Pretty Piti”—Like poems spoke by old Italians in South American palm mud, flat, who wanta go back to Palabbrio, reggi, and stroll the beauteous bell-ringing girl-walking boulevard and drink aperitif with the coffee muggers of the card street—O movie—A movie by God, showing us him—him,—and us showing him,—him which is us—for how can there be two, not-one? Palmsunday me that, Bishop San Jose . . .

I'll go light candles to the Madonna, I'll paint the Madonna, and eat ice cream, benny and bread—“Dope and saltpork,” as Bhikku Booby said—I'll go to the South of Sicily in the winter, and paint memories of Easels—I'll buy a piano and Mozart me that—I'll write long sad tales about people in the legend of my life—This part is my part of the movie, let's hear yours.

 
BY JACK KEROUAC

 

The Town and the City

The Scripture of the Golden Eternity

Some of the Dharma

Old Angel Midnight

Good Blonde and Others

Pull My Daisy

Trip Trap

Pic

The Portable Jack Kerouac

Selected Letters: 1940–1956

Selected Letters: 1957–1969

Atop an Underwood

Orpheus Emerged

 

POETRY

Mexico City Blues

Scattered Poems

Pomes All Sizes

Heaven and Other Poems

Book of Blues

Book of Haikus

 

THE DULUOZ LEGEND

Visions of Gerard

Doctor Sax

Maggie Cassidy

Vanity of Duluoz

On the Road

Visions of Cody

The Subterraneans

Tristessa

Lonesome Traveller

Desolation Angels

The Dharma Bums

Book of Dreams

Big Sur

Satori in Paris